New York Loves Them? Tough!
<First published in the New York Times on September 9, 2007>
AS dancegoing New Yorkers might hope, the living choreographers for whom their city is most renowned — Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris — are all scheduled to present new works in the coming 12 months and to revive beloved works from their past. So far so good. But too little of it will open in New York City. And there is no knowing when or even if some of it will be seen here.
Perhaps the brightest news of all is that Ms. Tharp, ambitious as ever, is collaborating with two of today’s most remarkable composers. As I write, she is at work in Florida, preparing a new 40-minute ballet to commissioned music by Elvis Costello for Miami City Ballet. This work (sharing a program with Balanchine’s “Square Dance”) is to open on March 28 at the Ziff Ballet Opera House in Miami, with 11 performances in Florida already announced. Obviously it’s to be hoped that the Costello-Tharp collaboration proves a major event that makes it out of Florida.
Meanwhile Ms. Tharp is also at work with Danny Elfman (12 Tim Burton films, “Desperate Housewives” and much else) on a ballet to be performed by American Ballet Theater in May. The costumes, as with many previous Tharp works, will be by the fashion designer Norma Kamali. This ballet will be part of a double bill. (The other work is yet to be announced.)
Numerous regional companies from Atlanta to Kansas City will acquire various Tharp works in 2008. The list at twylatharp.org makes it look as if Ms. Tharp is getting ready to take over the American dance world. This does not recompense us, however, for the unhappy fact that she no longer maintains an exclusive company of her own. The Ballet Theater premiere aside, New York will see a few Tharp pieces, including three of her best, each too seldom seen.
The week of Oct. 29 brings two of them, but in very different settings. At the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers (Oct. 29 and Nov. 1-3), Ice Theater New York acquires, amid other new repertory, “After All,” the solo Ms. Tharp created in 1976 to Albinoni’s Trumpet Concerto in B flat for the legendary skater John Curry. It is to be danced by Ice Theater’s co-artistic director, David Liu.
At City Center, Ballet Theater stages “Baker’s Dozen” (1979). This sensual ballroom romp to the music of Willie (The Lion) Smith used to be, as Ms. Tharp’s own company once danced it, my favorite Tharp dance ever: fecund, witty, elegant, blithe. Then, in June, New York City Ballet revives “Brahms/Handel,” the ballet she choreographed with Jerome Robbins in 1984 for the company.
Not seen since 1991, this cascading dual-torrent ballet — its cast is divided into two separate troupes, each led by a virtuoso ballerina resplendent — used to seem like the only masterpiece created for City Ballet since the death of Balanchine. Here’s hoping it will be as ebullient again.
Not so very many years ago the New York dance year would include annual repertory visits by the companies of Ms. Tharp, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and others, like fixtures in the city’s calendar as constant as its local ballet seasons. Today Mr. Taylor is the only modern-dance choreographer with such a season. His 2008 City Center one brings two New York premieres. One of these, “De Sueños,” recently had its first performance at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C.; it’s set to the Kronos Quartet ’s “Nuevo,” an album of Mexican music. This dance was actually due, at press time, to have received its New York premiere Saturday at Battery Park, but without Santo Loquasto’s elaborate décor (described as a landscape of skulls). New York will not see this set until the City Center season.
Mr. Taylor’s other premiere, as yet untitled, also to a Kronos Quartet recording and designed by Mr. Loquasto, is to have its first performance in November in Overland Park, Kan. Although he has let ballet companies dance his ready-made repertory, he has very seldom staged a premiere for ballet dancers, but San Francisco Ballet has announced a Taylor world premiere for its New Works season (April 22 to May 6). Again, one can only hope this will one day reach New York.
But there is no news of any Cunningham season in the city. The premiere of Mr. Cunningham’s latest work should be a matter of local history, since it features those two echt New York School artists, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage. When Cunningham dance theater first reached definitive form, its chief designer was Mr. Rauschenberg (“My biggest canvas is the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,” he said in 1964) and its chief composer was Cage.
Though Cage died in 1992, his “Aria” and “Fontana Mix” will be used for the new work, “Xover” (pronounced “Crossover”). Since Mr. Rauschenberg’s last designs for Cunningham, for the 2000 “Interscape,” were perhaps his most brilliant stage designs of all (this of an artist whose greatest work is, I believe, his stage designs), there is reason to hope for much. The work is to tour in 2008, abroad and within the United States. It is not known if New York will ever see it.
Now that Mr. Cunningham is 88 and choreographing more slowly, some of the places once filled by premieres are now taken by revivals of works not danced in many decades. “Crises” (1960, not seen since 1970) was revived in 2006 and will remain in the 2007-8 repertory. The next such revival will be “Second Hand” (1970) in Washington in March. To European cities like London and Paris, which have long enjoyed consistently more extended and frequent Cunningham seasons, New York’s apparent indifference to his work is a matter of disbelief and even contempt.
Mark Morris, who produced two new full-evening dance shows in 2006 (“King Arthur,” which comes to the New York City Opera in the spring, and “Mozart Dances”) and has already produced three new dance works in 2007, is touring the country this year, from Berkeley to Boston, with a range of his established repertory while he prepares his “Romeo and Juliet,” which has been announced as the world premiere of the original version of Prokofiev’s score, featuring music and stage plans (a happy ending!) he was barred from using by the Soviet Union. The premiere is at Bard Summerscape on July 4.
Mr. Morris is also preparing two other and shorter out-of-town premieres: a ballet for the New Works season at San Francisco Ballet (see Paul Taylor above) to a commissioned score by John Adams, and a work, currently in rehearsal and possibly to open at Tanglewood in June, to Samuel Barber’s “Excursions.”
The new year will bring anniversaries for two other choreographers to whom New York was long home: Jerome Robbins (1918-98) and Antony Tudor (1908-87). How differently these anniversaries will be observed.
The 10th anniversary of Robbins’s death will prompt celebrations across the country and around the world: Robbins triple bills at San Francisco Ballet (March 8-19) and Pacific Northwest Ballet (May 29 to June 8); the Royal Ballet in London’s first revival of his “Dances at a Gathering” in more than 31 years; and, at New York City Ballet, a Robbins-based spring season featuring no fewer than 30 ballets, the largest-scale celebration anywhere of any single choreographer’s works other than City Ballet’s 1993 celebration of its founding maestro, George Balanchine.
But what commemoration of Tudor will there be? This English-born choreographer was one of ballet’s foremost modernists (widely if simplistically called its psychologist), and there remain to this day several authorities who maintain (as very many did in the 1940s and ’50s) that he was the foremost ballet choreographer of his era. He was a central part of American Ballet Theater from its foundation, and in the 20 years since his death a number of his ballets have been danced by ballet companies worldwide.
New York’s only big ballet-company chance to observe the centenary of his birth (April 4, 1908) comes with five Ballet Theater performances this fall of his lyrical work “The Leaves Are Fading” (City Center, Oct. 24 to Nov. 3). Out of town you can go to Chicago to see a Joffrey Ballet triple bill of “Jardin aux Lilas,” “Dark Elegies” and “Offenbach in the Underworld” (eight performances, Feb. 22 to March 2) or to Boston in May to see six Boston Ballet performances of “Dark Elegies” (1937), his classic evocation of a community of mourning parents.
Doubtless other Tudor ballets will materialize before the year is out, but the number is unlikely to be enough to give him the honor he deserves. New Yorkers who hope to see his greatest work, “Jardin aux Lilas” (also danced as “Lilac Garden”), locally must content themselves with two February performances by the enterprising little New York Theater Ballet of this and four of his lesser-known ballets. Are we to see 2008 without revivals of “Soirée Musicale,” “Gala Performance,” “Pillar of Fire” and “Echoing of Trumpets”?
While touching on causes for dismay, I must mention Ballet Theater’s repertory from December to July. Other than the double bill featuring Ms. Tharp’s Elfman premiere, only evening-length works are announced. New York gets “La Bayadère,” “The Merry Widow,” “Don Quixote,” “Le Corsaire,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” next spring. Has any major ballet company since the fall of the Berlin Wall ever had repertory more completely unadventurous?
In 1989 it was said that the Kirov Ballet was at last trying to enter the 20th century; in 2008 it looks as if Ballet Theater is trying to move in the opposite direction. Twyla Tharp alone stands between it and artistic torpor.
The new year will bring anniversaries for two other choreographers to whom New York was long home: Jerome Robbins (1918-98) and Antony Tudor (1908-87). How differently these anniversaries will be observed.
The 10th anniversary of Robbins’s death will prompt celebrations across the country and around the world: Robbins triple bills at San Francisco Ballet (March 8-19) and Pacific Northwest Ballet (May 29 to June 8); the Royal Ballet in London’s first revival of his “Dances at a Gathering” in more than 31 years; and, at New York City Ballet, a Robbins-based spring season featuring no fewer than 30 ballets, the largest-scale celebration anywhere of any single choreographer’s works other than City Ballet’s 1993 celebration of its founding maestro, George Balanchine.
But what commemoration of Tudor will there be? This English-born choreographer was one of ballet’s foremost modernists (widely if simplistically called its psychologist), and there remain to this day several authorities who maintain (as very many did in the 1940s and ’50s) that he was the foremost ballet choreographer of his era. He was a central part of American Ballet Theater from its foundation, and in the 20 years since his death a number of his ballets have been danced by ballet companies worldwide.
New York’s only big ballet-company chance to observe the centenary of his birth (April 4, 1908) comes with five Ballet Theater performances this fall of his lyrical work “The Leaves Are Fading” (City Center, Oct. 24 to Nov. 3). Out of town you can go to Chicago to see a Joffrey Ballet triple bill of “Jardin aux Lilas,” “Dark Elegies” and “Offenbach in the Underworld” (eight performances, Feb. 22 to March 2) or to Boston in May to see six Boston Ballet performances of “Dark Elegies” (1937), his classic evocation of a community of mourning parents.
Doubtless other Tudor ballets will materialize before the year is out, but the number is unlikely to be enough to give him the honor he deserves. New Yorkers who hope to see his greatest work, “Jardin aux Lilas” (also danced as “Lilac Garden”), locally must content themselves with two February performances by the enterprising little New York Theater Ballet of this and four of his lesser-known ballets. Are we to see 2008 without revivals of “Soirée Musicale,” “Gala Performance,” “Pillar of Fire” and “Echoing of Trumpets”?
While touching on causes for dismay, I must mention Ballet Theater’s repertory from December to July. Other than the double bill featuring Ms. Tharp’s Elfman premiere, only evening-length works are announced. New York gets “La Bayadère,” “The Merry Widow,” “Don Quixote,” “Le Corsaire,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” next spring. Has any major ballet company since the fall of the Berlin Wall ever had repertory more completely unadventurous?
In 1989 it was said that the Kirov Ballet was at last trying to enter the 20th century; in 2008 it looks as if Ballet Theater is trying to move in the opposite direction. Twyla Tharp alone stands between it and artistic torpor.
@New York Times, 2007.